Passports

I went to Guangzhou (U.S. Consulate) and got my new passport. It was available the day after I returned from Singapore more than a month ago, but I had been too busy to make another trip to Guangzhou. Instead, I already went to Hong Kong twice, using the emergency passport.

The emergency passport is good for one year, and it contains only a few visa pages. Before you know it, I had those pages filled up already. It was time to fetch my new passport.

As if there had not been enough drama in this whole event of losing my passport, I nearly lost the emergency passport on Sunday! (The Consulate opened on Monday.) I was having a drink with a friend when her friends called. We were to join them for dinner. Just before we got to the meeting place, I suddenly realized that I couldn't find my emergency passport!

I still had it in the morning when I attended an international fellowship (only passport holders were allowed). The only other times I could lose it was at lunch or at the bookstore when I paid. We decided to go back to the place where we had a drink. Luckily my friend had good eyes and spotted it right away - under the table where we sat. Phew!

It must have slipped out of the pocket of my jacket when I laid it around. That was probably how I lost my old passport!

For the time being I am going to travel with two passports - the new passport and the canceled emergency passport, since the Chinese visa (expiring in September) is still glued to the emergency passport.

Restaurant Service

Friday night I attended a dinner event in Hong Kong. There were 30 tables with about 10 people per table, so we are talking about 300 people in one banquet.

The service was excellent! I often think that the service in Shenzhen restaurants is better than most other cities in China, but it's still no comparison to what I have experienced in Hong Kong. Just one example: In Shenzhen, waiters and waitresses would come to replace your plate with a clean one after you eat for a while (in most other cities, they don't even care). But often, either I need to ask the waiter to come to replace my plate, or they replace it "too soon." In other words, the timing often makes me uncomfortable. It didn't happen on Friday night. The plates were replaced a few times, but my eating wasn't interrupted at all! It was that smooth.

How did they manage it? They observed, instead of just going through the mechanics. They not only watched the plates in front of us, they also watched the food on the table. So when they came to replace our plates, it was the only reasonable act! They didn't even ask, "May I replace your plate?" because there was no need to ask.

I also noticed that in this Hong Kong restaurant, most waiters and waitresses were not necessarily young and pretty, which appeared to be the "standard" in China, but they obviously understood providing good service.

The Club

Recently the apartment right across the hallway from my apartment became the site of a certain "Board Game Club"; they even have a website. People would go in to play a few times a week, usually a weekday night and the whole weekend. Luckily it hasn't been too noise. (Had it been a "Mahjong Club"...)

I actually was tempted a couple of times to walk in uninvited and just observe. (I guess I would be pardoned for being the very next door neighbor.) But this entry is not about this club.

This past Thursday I had a most wonderful experience with the Nicodemus Club. Probably for the first time in the past few years that I wasn't the host "by default" while I was in town. Along with transitioning my work duties to replacement managers, it was also time for me to step down as the chairperson of the Nicodemus Club.

The core members of the club held a meeting when I happened to be out of town recently, and they came up with a plan for future conduct of the activities. Basically there will be 4 pairs to lead the activities by turn. I thought it was an excellent arrangement to get more people involved. We attempted such a system once but it didn't last, mainly because 1) people had become too comfortable for having me as the host, and 2) I probably enjoyed it too much myself. I am glad that the current situation is forcing us to make changes. They will do better without me!

The topic for this past Thursday was challenges in marriage, and it attracted quite some coworkers, several of whom came to Nicodemus for the first time. I would not be a very helpful host for such a topic (since I was only married for a minus few years), and the young couple who happened to be the host gave some excellent real-life testimonies.

I will miss the club, but surely, they will do better without me. :-)

"Desert" on an Island

By "desert" I don't really mean that there was a desert on an island, but that we had a "desert experience" on the island. Actually, two.

On Saturday two bus loads of my Chinese coworkers with their family and friends went on this hiking trip to a nearby island, total of nearly 100 of us. The buses took us to the seashore, and we took speedboats to the island. The weather was favorable, as the sun was hiding behind the clouds most of the time. We were set to have some fun, ignoring the fact that none of us had been on this island before.

The island was largely unexplored, and the fishing village on the island was what we would still call a "natural village." We passed through it, with the villagers ignoring us, and we ignoring them. On the back of the village was a vast woods. According to some information we got online, going through the woods would take us to a hilltop, where we would enjoy a spectacular ocean view.

Of course, soon we got lost. Half way through the woods after a few turns, we got to a point where we couldn't continue. There was no visible path in front of us. Uh oh (see picture below on the left).

 

What did we do? Like the ancient times, we sent out spies. Two spies retracted our coming path to see if we made a wrong turn earlier. Five minutes later we didn't hear any encouraging updates from them through walkie-talkie, so we sent four more spies, two to the left, and two to the right. Finally, the spies to the left claimed that they found a way. We waited two more minutes for them to confirm the discovery, and yes, the path looked good. The troop moved again, and soon we were out of woods (see picture above on the right).

This led us to the hilltop, and the view was spectacular! My camera couldn't do justice, and it was quite foggy all around. (But somebody did a good job; see photo by one of my coworkers below.)

After that, we formed three groups to continue our adventure. One group went east to go around the island, one group went west to go around the island, and one group stayed at the hilltop and would return to the pier, which was a short beach, through the way that we came. I joined the group that went west, and there were about 40 of us. Here are some views that we enjoyed (see pictures below). The island didn't have much beach at all, and rocks were everywhere.

 

 

Since some of us just liked to hike, and some of us took more time to appreciate the sights, gradually half of the group fell behind. I was the very last, partly because as one of the coordinators, I wanted to make sure that no one got lost.

The group ahead of us informed through walkie-talkie that after going through a bamboo woods (see picture below on the left) and a few small houses, we would be back to the pier, where we would get on the speedboats again. We had, up to that point, hiked over two hours, and we would indeed appreciate to get "home" soon.

 

After the bamboo woods, we saw a few water tanks (picture above on the right). It wasn't exactly a spectacular sight, but this was where we (the last group) made a critical mistake. Instead of turning right here, we turned left, and we didn't hit the pier as early as we had hoped.

In fact, we got lost again (picture below on the left). We reached the seashore, all right, but the pier was nowhere in sight. We had no choice but to continue along the coastline. If you saw a few pictures earlier, you would understand that we had a lot of rocks to climb over. I was most impressed by this guy (picture below on the right), who wore saddles all this time and insisted that he didn't need to change shoes. 

 

After rocks and rocks, we were getting exhausted, yet we still didn't know how much longer it would take to reach the pier. I became dizzy, in fact, and you bet that I said a few prayers, including my favorite Isaiah 40:31. At one point I almost fell from a rock! (By the way, I was still at the end of the group.)

I had to stop, breathless. Finally coming to senses, I did two things. First I did something for myself: I called for help, asking the guy in front of me to relieve my backpack. Second I did something for the group, asking everyone to stop. I examined our surroundings and through walkie-talkie contacted a coordinator who had reached the pier, asking if it was possible to send a few speedboats to the site we were at instead of us keeping going like this.

It turned out to be a plausible solution. After half an hour of resting and waiting, we were rescued (see pictures below)! Consider it prayers answered!

 

Changing Seats

Our company is undergoing major seats re-assignments. Basically we have too many people for the current space; nice problem to have in this time of financial crisis. In the office building, we own 3 floors, and we have been only using half of the top floor for the last 2-3 years, as the other half was rented out to another company. Finally the lease to the other company ended last month, and now we have more space to move around.

Two project teams on this floor are moving one floor up, and the rest of the project teams are shuffled around. The project team that I managed for the past year is also making a major shift. But guess what? Since I was just relieved of the project manager role, and now I am managing a different team - a team of business analysts - I get to stay in the same spot! Haha. There are like 3 people in total on this floor who don't have to move, including the department director, who has an office instead of a cubicle.

This is big relief to me, since I would have so much stuff to move, including all the books. In fact, that's why I can update my blog right now, as everyone else is busy moving their equipments in the office. :-)

Take a Break, Please

As a project manager, I encourage the team members to take a break regularly. My suggestions include to drink a lot of water, which means they would need to get up often to refill their mugs, which also results in going to the bathroom often. It would be good to our health. Except I don't necessarily do what I preach.

But one of the engineers took the advice to heart. He installed a software called EyeGuard on his computer, and whenever he worked on the computer continuously for a specified period of time, say half an hour, the screen would lock for, say, 2 minutes, and he had to get up and leave his seat. (It's like the opposite of screen saver, in which case the screen locks when there is an extensive idle time; in this case, an extensive busy time locks the screen.)

I finally installed the little application myself. It is quite cute.

Birthday in China

Last year when a group of our U.S. clients visited Shenzhen, one of them happened to have his birthday during the visit. We surprised him with a birthday cake at the lunch table, and I led our project team to hold an additional celebration in our conference room for him. He went home and told everybody about this experience in China.

This week another group of U.S. clients are visiting, and one of them, Amber, happened to have her birthday yesterday. Another member on the visiting team, Andrew, who seems particularly close to Amber, suggested us to do the same thing for her. We happily complied.

I found it an opportunity to express the occasion in our software development lingo, as I said to her, "Amber, a certain product manager [Andrew's title] sent in the requirements [which indeed is his job description]. We are sorry that we didn't send you the functional specification document for approval [which is Amber's responsibility], but we hope that the coding and unit test were done correctly. Now it's time for user acceptance test." Amber joyfully cut the cake.